The D Brief: Hard choices ahead for USAF in the Pacific; 3 invasion scenarios for Taiwan; Navy’s manpower problems; A new drone that doesn’t need GPS; And a bit more.

The U.S. Air Force’s plan to scatter small bases around the Pacific may be in jeopardy until the service figures out how it can protect them, service chief Gen. David Allvin told reporters on Wednesday. 

What’s going on: The U.S. Army has traditionally provided air defense systems like the Patriot to defend some bases abroad, but those systems will be too expensive to post at multiple small island bases in the Pacific, Defense One’s Audrey Decker reports. 

“If we can't have [air defenses] at every space,” Allvin said, “we want to be able to decide where to place them, which means they need to be mobile enough to be able not just to be fixed, and so that's some of the cleverness that has to happen with this, as well as the ability to rapidly move.” While there’s no formal agreement with the Army, there’s an “understanding” that the Army will help the Air Force figure out how to defend its air bases and find new solutions, he said. 

Bigger picture: Propping up small bases around the Pacific is a key part of the Air Force’s strategy (known as Agile Combat Employment) to be more mobile and rely less on a handful of large airfields. Continue reading, here. 

Next week: White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan will travel to Beijing for talks with Foreign Minister Wang Yi. This will be Sullivan’s fifth such meeting during President Biden’s tenure, but Sullivan’s first time traveling to China in this role. (The past four meetings occurred in Rome, Luxembourg, Vienna, and Bangkok.)

“Managing the [U.S.-China] relationship, that will be the focus,” a senior administration official said Friday in a call with reporters. 

Recall that this month two years ago, national security observers worldwide were on edge as China’s military carried out what appeared to be rehearsals for a naval blockade of Taiwan. That kind of operation “would aim to cripple Taiwan by cutting off trade, especially imports of energy and other material needed to sustain Taiwan’s bustling economy and population of nearly 24 million people,” analysts at the Center for Strategic and International Studies write in a new report published Thursday mapping possible blockade scenarios. 

Review the “six main types” of Chinese military forces likely to be relied upon during a possible blockade of Taiwan, including surface ships, submarines, aircraft, rocket forces, and more in the new report. But China’s Coast Guard would also likely play a big role in helping “portray the blockade as a domestic law enforcement matter,” CSIS predicts. 

The report is an intriguing, multimedia glimpse into Taiwan’s defenses, with a detailed focus on three possible scenarios of Chinese military action against the democratic nation—including an “all-out kinetic blockade,” a “mining blockade” endangering Taiwan’s ports, and a “limited blockade.” The former, CSIS warns, “is the more plausible one and most in line with Chinese military doctrine.” Read over the full report, here. 

By the way: Taipei’s Foreign Minister Lin Chia-lung and Joseph Wu, Taiwan’s national security adviser, were in the Washington area this week for talks with U.S. officials, the Financial Times reported Thursday. The visit is the first of its kind since President Lai Ching-te took office in May.  

Related reading: 

• “Taiwan boosts defense spending in face of Chinese military prodding,” Defense News reported Friday; 
• “On frontline island, Taiwan president rejects China's rule for freedom,” Reuters reported Friday from Kinmen; 
• “How quickly can Taiwan integrate US weapon systems? Speed is essential to help deter China,” the Atlantic Council’s Adam Kozloski wrote this week; 
• “Breakup of Chinese Rocket Prompts Warnings About Space Junk,” the Wall Street Journal reported Friday regarding a notably consequential Chinese launch on August 6;  
• “Iran seeks China’s help with surveillance satellites, officials say,” the Washington Post reported last weekend;
• And “China’s super-secret space plane spotted above Europe,” Popular Science reported two weeks ago. 

Welcome to this Friday edition of The D Brief, brought to you by Ben Watson and Audrey Decker. Share your newsletter tips, reading recommendations, or feedback here. And if you’re not already subscribed, you can do that here. On this day in 2023, Russian paramilitary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin and nine others perished when his business jet exploded while flying over Russia almost exactly two months to the day since he attempted to carry out a coup as his men, in tanks and aircraft, raced toward Moscow in protest of the Russian military’s poor performance in Ukraine.

Germany’s NATO Airbase Geilenkirchen raised and then lowered its security level over the past 18 or so hours, citing unspecified “intelligence information indicating potential threat,” officials said Thursday evening and early Friday on social media. 

“All non-mission essential staff [were] sent home as a precautionary measure,” they said when initially announcing base security had been escalated to Charlie, which is the second-highest alert. It has since been lowered back down to Bravo+ status, officials said Friday.

Geilenkirchen, which is near the Netherlands border, hosts the alliance’s Airborne Early Warning and Control Force. Elsewhere in Germany Thursday, officials said “they were investigating suspicions of espionage for the purpose of sabotage, without elaborating on who might be behind it,” the Associated Press reports. “The incidents come at a time of jitters about the possible vulnerability of infrastructure to attempted Russian sabotage.” 

Developing: The U.S. Navy is working on retasking civilian mariners across 17 different support ships “due to a lack of qualified mariners to operate the vessels,” U.S. Naval Institute News reported Thursday. 

Involved: Two replenishment ships, an oiler, 12 fast transport vessels, and two forward-deployed expeditionary sea bases—the USS Lewis Puller, based in Bahrain; and the USS Herschel “Woody” Williams, based in Greece. According to USNI, “sidelin[in]g all the ships could reduce the civilian mariner demand for [the Navy’s Military Sealift Command] by as many as 700 billets.”

One catch: The plan hasn’t yet been approved by Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Lisa Franchetti. There’s a bit more to unpack in this story, which you can read in full, here. 

The U.S. Army selected a Nevada-based defense tech firm to kit up its new fleet of spy planes, service officials announced Thursday. Sierra Nevada Corporation was awarded the initial contract this week at a price of $93.5 million. The deal is a “12-year indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity contract” that maxes out at $991 million, the Army said in its announcement. 

It’s part of the Army’s HADES program, which stands for High Accuracy Detection and Exploitation System (read: spy plane). The Army tapped Bombardier Defense this past January to design its first HADES prototype aircraft, which will be the large-cabin Global 6500 jet, with a range of about 6,600 nautical miles. That’s “enough to get intelligence equipment to Europe or the Pacific from the continental United States,” Defense One’s Sam Skove reported in January. The first Global 6500 is expected to be delivered to the Army by early October. 

The HADES program is intended “to replace the [Army’s] legacy turboprop aircraft fleet currently comprised of the Guardrail, Enhanced Medium Altitude Reconnaissance and Surveillance System [here], and Airborne Reconnaissance Low aircraft [here],” service officials said Thursday. Those planes have been in service for more than four decades. More, here. 

New: A group of 20-year-olds built a cheap drone that can operate without GPS, and now they’re working with U.S. Army Special Operations, Defense One’s Patrick Tucker reported Thursday. 

The drone, which costs under $500, takes pictures and compares them to a database of Google image maps using simple machine learning. Its makers are called tTheseus, and they quickly started developing the drone after meeting with Ukrainians at a hackathon in San Francisco. 

Why it matters: Cheap drones have helped Ukraine enormously on the battlefield, but those drones rely on GPS guidance and can be jammed. tTheseus’s story shows how a new class of defense industry disruptors is changing the game—developing new military tech with cheap components at a fraction of the time and cost of traditional defense contractors, Tucker writes. Read more, here.  

A loaded crude oil tanker attacked by the Houthis Wednesday “now represents a navigational and environmental hazard” as it sits anchored and uncrewed somewhere between Yemen and Eritrea, European naval officials said Thursday. 

The crew was evacuated to Djibouti while officials figure out how to address the 150,000-ton tanker, the EU’s naval mission Aspides said on social media. 

Aspides sailors also say they destroyed a drone boat that approached the vessel after it was attacked and immobilized. “It is essential that everyone in the area exercises caution and refrains from any actions that could lead to a deterioration of the current situation,” EU officials warned Thursday. 

Also: U.S. forces in the region destroyed three Houthi aerial drones Thursday, including two on the Red Sea, Central Command officials said afterward. 

From the region: 

• “US military asking contractors to help haul boats used in troubled Gaza pier mission back to the US,” CNN reported Thursday;
• And “Feds in Iraq will continue to receive special premium pay, OPM says,” Government Executive reported this week.  

And lastly: This morning at the Pentagon, Indian Defense Minister Rajnath Singh dropped by for talks with Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin. Here are a few related links out of that scheduled meeting:

• “India, U.S. ink 2 key deals as Defence Minister Rajnath Singh visits Washington,” The Hindu reported Friday; 
• “Rajnath’s four-day US visit from Aug 23, talks on pending big-ticket defence deals on agenda,” the Indian Express reported Thursday; 
• See also, “India’s lunar lander unearths evidence the moon had a magma ocean,” the Washington Post reported Thursday; 

That’s it for us this week. Thanks for reading, and you can catch us again on Monday!